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Ashmore blinked as if confused, looking worried, slightly panicked, mouth opening and closing, but then he smiled and his face brightened as if a light was coming on inside him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, voice high-pitched. “You can stay the night. She’ll entertain you, won’t you, bitch?”
As if I would lay my head in his home.
When I stayed silent, the panic on his face spiked, worry filling his eyes, but still he forged on. “Show him to our guest quarters.” Then he lowered his voice, the threat hanging clear. “And don’t give him any trouble.”
The woman didn’t move, and instead stared at me, eyes so wide that even through her false lashes, I could see that her brown orbs were marked with terror, and unbidden, the desire to comfort her, to see that terror fade sparked in my chest.
“Now!” Ashmore yelled.
The woman jumped and then went to move, but I caught her and wrapped my hand around her wrist, the bones feeling delicate in my grip even through her padded flesh. I looked back at Ashmore.
“No. I keep her. For good.”
TWO
Fawn
I followed the man, or more accurately, was pulled behind him, fear of toppling off my shoes making me keep pace. He opened the opulent doors of David’s home, and the cool breeze against my mostly bare skin made me shiver even harder than the fear that snaked down my spine.
My gaze was centered on the broad expanse of his back, the tight T-shirt that pulled across his shoulders leaving no question of the powerful physique underneath. I kept my eyes there, the unreality of the situation making it impossible for me to look elsewhere, not even as I heard David behind us screaming at the man to stop.
An instant later, I felt the familiar wetness of David’s palm around my wrist, and then heard the snap of one of my heels after it got caught between two of the stones that lined the driveway.
“Argh!” I let out a stifled scream as I fell, losing my balance when David’s grip on one arm pulled me back even as the man moved inexorably forward.
I braced myself as best I could with no free hands, tried to ready myself for the shock of hitting what I knew from experience were hard stones.
But impact never came.
One second I was falling, and the next I was crushed against a warm chest that felt as solid as the stones beneath my feet. A thick arm around my waist held me, not allowing me to move when I tried to back away. I looked up the strong column of his neck to lips thinned in a cruel scowl and up farther until I met ice-green eyes. The chill I saw there made me back up again, but the arm around my waist still gave no quarter.
And then the man looked away, and I followed his gaze to where it rested on my arm. Without a word, David released me and the loss of his touch pushed me closer to the man. I didn’t try to move, had realized that doing so was futile now and instead looked at David’s face.
When I saw the rage that contorted his features, everything in me screamed that I should go to him, try to calm him or deal with the consequences. But that wasn’t an option. The man’s grip was tight, unbreakable, and though it didn’t hurt, I had about as much chance of breaking it as I did of predicting what David might do to me if I didn’t.
So yet again, I was stuck, torn between these two men, a bystander in my own life, wondering what the outcome would be. I knew what David could do, and though the man was unknown, I didn’t doubt that he was formidable. And so I stood, waiting, the ever-stretching moment thick with tension as the men eyed each other.
And then I was moving, the man practically carrying me the rest of the way down the drive. Before I knew it, I was in the passenger side of a luxury car, and before I could even think to jump out, the man had rounded the vehicle, slid behind the steering wheel, and taken off.
Before the gates were completely open, the man drove out and sped down the road. It hit me then that I was being driven away from a house that had been my own personal hell for so long that I never thought I’d get out of it. I’d fantasized about leaving that place so many times that I’d had to force myself to stop. The reality of waking up to David and whatever torture he had planned, the knowledge that I would never be free made the fantasy far more costly than the moments of happiness it gave me.
But those seconds of watching that house of horrors get smaller and smaller and smaller were the greatest gift I’d ever been given.
And when the house was gone completely, the horizon only dark skies and the reddish glow of taillights over asphalt, I turned forward and prepared myself to face what might become my new nightmare.
THREE
Fawn
I sat stock-still as the car purred down the road, smoothly guided by the man’s huge hands on the wheel. My fingers had been locked around the door’s handle since he’d closed it, and as discreetly as I could, I tightened my hold.
“That would be a painful way to die. And I wouldn’t stop to come back for you or tell anyone you were there.”
His deep voice sliced through the heavy silence of the car’s interior, his words, his gravelly rasp sending shards of ice through my veins. David had threatened to push me out of the car before, but I’d known it was all bluster. He preferred to work in private, wouldn’t risk someone seeing, or leave the possibility I might live. For all the pain he caused, the moment-by-moment suffering that being in his presence caused, I knew David, understood him. But this man…
I knew nothing of him, nothing of what he might do, and that was most terrifying of all. I sat up straighter, not sure why, knowing I had no place to go but needing to do something, anything, to try and tame the fear that had my nerves on edge.
